We believe that in many cases, medical training not only does not select for or cultivate such personality traits, but actively selects and develops barriers against them....

It is then that the student becomes a master at learning to shut down empathy. The living patient is not the primary component of education until the third year, and by then the preference is set for objective reasoning and testing versus empathy and compassion....

Internship and residency, the cornerstone of clinical training, are also closely associated with changes in mood and further loss of empathy.

Depression, anger, and fatigue increase and empathetic concern decreases [ii] -- the exact opposite of characteristics one would hope physician training would cultivate.

Even more unfortunate, empathy seems to stabilize at this level over the remainder of training rather than increase.

[iii] Lack of empathy is closely correlated with burnout, a psychological state of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization.

AMYGOODMAN: What was it that started you moving away and questioning what you were doing?

CHRISTIANBut, essentially, over those eight years, I started to meet people who I had kept outside of my social circle, who I hated: African Americans and Jews and gay people. But the truth was that I had never had a meaningful interaction with them. But when I started to, I started to receive compassion from the people that I least deserved it from, when I least deserved it. They could have attacked me. They could have threatened me. They could have broken my windows.

But they didn’t. And they knew who I was, and they took it upon themselves to show me empathy when I deserved it the least. And that helped me humanize them and dispel all the stereotypes that I had in my head. And suddenly, I couldn’t reconcile my hate anymore.

In a world that becomes increasingly automated and computerised, we are losing the very skills that are essential for effective leadership. How can we stop this shipwreck?

Let’s take a look:

1. Understand the meaning of empathyI have always found empathy to be intriguing because it allows you to read minds, something that came in handy as an FBI agent. By listening to another person’s words and reading their body language, you can figure out what they are feeling and thinking.

There is an empathy gap in society when it comes to having compassion for the challenges boys and young men face – the issues that underlie the statistics above.

Nobody sees investing in boys’ development as “worth it” and as a result boys today are growing up and deciding that it is not worth it for them to invest their time and energy back into their communities.

For many, virtual reality has become a safe haven, and in some instances more structured and rewarding than reality. Thus we see the emergence of terms such as hikikomori, diaosi, bamboccioni, and NEETs, along with the rise of movements such as Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW). Who can blame them for wanting to opt out?

Everyone wants to be heard. From hospitals to airlines to breakfast cereals, brands are now either trying hard - or being forced - to listen. This is where empathy comes in.

Our expert panel will detail how empathy works using real world examples from companies large and small. Under Jansen’s leadership, MD Anderson conducted in-depth interviews to improve their marketing. Patricia Roller is making empathy her business, and Nate Pagel is connecting families to the healthcare equation.

What is the attachment bond?The attachment bond is the unique emotional relationship between your baby and you as his or her primary caretaker. This wordless interactive emotional exchange draws the two of you together, ensuring that your infant will feel safe and be calm enough to experience optimal development of their nervous system. The attachment bond is a key factor in the way your infant's brain organizes itself and influences your child’s social, emotional, intellectual, and physical development.

The quality of the attachment bond varies. A secure bond provides your baby with an optimal foundation for life: eagerness to learn, healthy self-awareness, trust, and consideration for others. An insecure attachment bond, one that fails to meet your infant’s need for safety and understanding, can lead to confusion about his or her own identity and difficulties in learning and relating to others in later life.

Design Thinking cannot begin without a deeper understanding of the people you are designing for

Design Thinking cannot begin without a deeper understanding of the people you are designing for. To gain those insights, it is important for design thinkers to empathise with the people they’re designing for to understand their needs, thoughts, emotions and motivations. The good news is that there are a wide range of methods you can use in order to learn more about people. Even better news: with enough mindfulness and experience, anyone can become masters at empathising with people.

"Engaging with people directly reveals a tremendous amount about the way they think and the values they hold. Sometimes these thoughts and values are not obvious to the people who hold them. A deep engagement can surprise both the designer and the designee by the unanticipated insights that are different from what they actually do - are strong indicators of their deeply held beliefs about the way the world is." – d. School Bootcamp Bootleg, 2013

Developing Empathy towards People

The first stage (or mode) of the d.school’s Design Thinking process involves developing a sense of empathy towards the people you are designing for, to gain insights into what they need, what they want, how they behave, feel, and think, and why they demonstrate such behaviours, feelings, and thoughts when interacting with products in a real-world setting.

At the end of July, I spoke at the Digital Summit in Kansas City and presented on this topic, Closing the Empathy Gap: Six Ways to Develop Better Consumer Insights. The presentation focused on ways to better empathize with people – real people, not fictional personas – in an era of big data. I talked about some of the forces at play contributing to the empathy gap, and then I introduced an “empathy stack” of tools and techniques to deploy in your everyday work.

Don’t get stuck in the empathy gap. Learn how to get the most out of your data.

See below for my entire presentation—or click to view in Slideshare—including the slides of my presentation, as well as my presenter note

This story is based on a radio interview. Listen to the full interview.

“Actor Alan Alda is on a mission to help scientists make their research more relatable to the public. He even co-founded an organization at New York’s Stony Brook University, the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, to get the message out.

Alda’s insights are drawn from decades spent getting inside the heads of audiences. Some of the techniques he suggests for scientists may seem strange at first, like trying to speak in sync with another person, or explain to middle-schoolers what a flame is. But according to Alda, there’s really one simple ingredient to effective communication, no matter who you are. It’s empathy.

A few video clips from Jordan Peterson's interview with Stephan Molyneux, along with an excerpt from a video by Paul Bloom on Big Think.

I have some issues with Stephan Molyneux overall, but I found this particular interview insightful in a number of ways.

The clips in this compilation highlight some of the concern when empathy is overstated. When a group empathizes, they identify those they empathize with as 'victims'. This can lead to the creation of a culture of victimhood, and a need to find victims to fight for. Empathy then drives the potential for hate against those perceived as perpetrators.

1. Lead with intention. Be deliberate in your efforts to shape the culture of your organization and don’t assume that it will form naturally based on having a good group of people in place. As a leader, every interaction is an opportunity to create or reinforce a powerful, positive experience for your team – to remind people of what’s most important to the success of the collective.

There is a third alternative that negotiates the fine line between violence and inaction. “Peace,” wrote psychologist and famed global practitioner of conflict resolution Marshall Rosenberg, “requires something far more difficult than revenge or merely turning the other cheek; it requires empathizing with the fears and unmet needs that provide the impetus for people to attack each other.”

Our task, Rosenberg challenges us, is to actively engage those who hate, but not with brute force similar to that with which they engage and provoke us. While they present us with fists and aggression, we receive them with ears and compassion.

It sounds almost ludicrous doesn’t it? It certainly sounds dangerous and dubious. How can we possibly respond to hate with patience and empathy? How is that any less weak and passive than ignoring their provocation and/or turning the other cheek? Aside of the risks involved, why should we believe for a moment that this type of response is any more effective than those we have already considered?

Life After Hate, Inc., a 501(c)(3) U.S. nonprofit, was created in 2011 by former members of the American violent far-right extremist movement. Through powerful stories of transformation and unique insight gleaned from decades of experience, we serve to inspire, educate, guide, and counsel.

Whether working with individuals who wish to leave a life of hate and violence or helping organizations (community, educational, civic, government, etc.) grappling with the causes of intolerance and racism, Life After Hate works to counter the seeds of hate we once planted. Through personal experience and highly unique skill sets, we have developed a sophisticated understanding about what draws individuals to extremist groups and, equally important, why they leave.

Compassion is the opposite of judgment and we understand the roles compassion and empathy play in healing individuals and communities.

For Baldwin’s school district, empathy has been a focal point partly because of the area’s high rate of addiction and suicide.

“It’s really important to build those relationships.... It might be the one thing that gets some of our kids through – that relationship with a caring adult,” she says.

At the start of the school year, “students are reluctant, they feel nervous,” Baldwin says, even though most know one another. So she starts off with low-risk opportunities to talk in small groups about various topics. Then they’ll share something from the group to the rest of the class. “They’re not naming names ... [but] they basically have to call out one of their group mates in a positive way.”

Besides the meltdowns and over-the-top photo shoots, Tyra Banks’ America’s Next Top Model brought us “smizing”: smiling with the eyes. Turns out that what’s arguably the most famous Tyra-ism may have some scientific truth. Our eyes convey a rich array of expressions — and according to new research, how well we read those emotions may depend on our DNA.

A June Molecular Psychiatry study suggests that genetics may influence our ability to infer people’s thoughts or feelings from their eyes — a trait known as cognitive empathy. Scientists from the University of Cambridge have traced this ability to a tiny segment of chromosome 3 in women.

PEOPLE WHO ARE IMAGINATIVE AND INTELLECTUALLY CURIOUS ARE ALSO LIKELY BETTER AT READING OTHERS’ EMOTIONS.

Were I asked what ability should an artist or writer have above everything else, my immediate answer would not have much to do with style and technique. My answer would be that the artist or writer should have empathy, the ability to look at the world from another person’s perspective.

Surely the artist and writer would need the capacity for sympathy, the capacity to feel what another person is feeling especially when that person feels sorrow and loss. But empathy is something else entirely. A good writer or artist must have the ability to look at the world beyond one’s own perspective.

To define the world according to one’s own perspective is easy. But one finds that some of the greatest works of art and literature were done and written not always from the writer’s or artist’s viewpoint.

Were I asked what ability should an artist or writer have above everything else, my immediate answer would not have much to do with style and technique

The Google memo calls for less empathy because emotions are bad for work. This one paragraph pretty much sums up his whole message. I don’t agree with a word of it, but I still won’t deny him my empathy.

I’ve heard several calls for increased empathy on diversity issues. While I strongly support trying to understand how and why people think the way they do, relying on affective empathy—feeling another’s pain—causes us to focus on anecdotes, favor individuals similar to us, and harbor other irrational and dangerous biases. Being emotionally unengaged helps us better reason about the facts.

My first understanding of the word empathy began with my second grade teacher’s concrete explanation—empathy is about being in someone else’s shoes, having a walk around in them to get a sense of the world from their point of view.

Empathy it turns out, is complicated—much of it has little to do with our conscious minds. Whether or not we’re able to express empathy for someone depends on our innate, lizard brain perceptions of others as either belonging to the same group we belong to (us) or people belonging to an outgroup (them).

A book called Against Empathy came out in late 2016. Author Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology and cognitive science, has consequently gotten a lot of exposure for such an eye-catching title.

I’ve found contradictions in what he says. (e.g. empathy means many things vs. empathy is feeling what the other person is feeling)

I got a chance to speak with Steve Paulson of Wisconsin Public Radio’s To the Best of Our Knowledge about using cognitive empathy in product design. Podcast: Does empathy have a design flaw? (21 minutes) Transcript below –

Fear of EmpathyWhen I wrote my book Practical Empathy, I chose my vocabulary carefully. I was thinking of the many clients who got distracted by the words "feelings" and "emotion," who got great laughs by turning a listening session into a Hollywood psychoanalysis session.

"How does that make you feel?" (They were pretending to ask this of their customers, who were engineers trying to solve systems problems.) I wanted to be careful not to distract my readers with their own reactions.

I emphasized cognitive empathy so readers could calmly explore what I was proposing. I tried to help readers become aware that the "science" and "data-driven" proof organization reference as proof for a design decisions isn't the same as scientific rigor in biology or physics--and that the hypotheses organizations craft spring from a narrow understanding of the problem space. (Narrow might be fine for some markets, but increasingly markets are revealing themselves as much more complex.) But my careful vocabulary has failed in a couple of respects.

Teachers are some of the earliest role models of empathy. Here are some action-based strategies that you can start using today to nurture empathy in your students:

1.Define it.Empathy is when you’re able to understand and care about how someone else is feeling. One of the best explanations of empathy on the web is from our friends at Sesame Street in an episode when Mark Ruffalo and Murray talk about the word. Watch the video and use it as a starting point for a discussion. Watch here.

2. Take care of yourself.Teaching can be exhausting and there are situations that can get in the way of our own capacity to empathize. ...

Using the power of empathy, brain science, and cognitive behavioral therapy provide people with a comprehensive self-help tool to lessen stress and create life balance. So how can using this tool help employees to be more productive, focused, collaborative, and more relaxed in their job?

On Wednesday, August 16, 2017 at 1pm ET #WorkTrends host Meghan M. Biro and her special guest Dr. Arthur Ciaramicoli discuss the importance of using empathy, brain science and cognitive behavioral therapy to advance our mental well-being and workplace relationships.

The Three Elements Of Organizational EmpathyAndy, Michelle, and Matt identified three foundational elements of organizational empathy.

TransparencyI’ve always believed it’s extremely difficult to keep secrets in an organization. Rather than getting caught up in a cycle of cutting people off from information, think about flipping that line of thinking on its head. Keep people informed and in share the current realities of the business so they can actively participate in helping drive the performance you’re looking for.

CommunicationHonest, open communication from leadership is important but in this context, communication goes well beyond that. Two-way dialogue where stakeholders feel safe to voice their opinions, perceptions, questions, and concerns with leaders who are mature enough to listen and openly accept and value feedback is critical.

Trust“It can’t just be transparency, communication, and trust at the executive level; it needs to be company-wide,” says Michelle. “Talking through the challenges that other departments are going through and what they are trying to accomplish is important. It helps set the context and help people understand how we’re all moving forward together.”

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Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

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Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.